Zuckerberg rings ceremonial Nasdaq bell

UPDATE: With about an hour to go in trading, Facebook has posted a solid, but hardly spectacular debut on Wall Street. During the day, the company’s stock price reached as high as $45, fell back to near it initial price and had been in the $40 range.

Meanwhile, stock in social games developer Zynga has been hammered by investors who were hoping for a far bigger pop from Facebook. Trading in Zynga shares was halted twice and its price is off about 12.5 percent.

LinkedIn shares were down about 6 percent.

UPDATE (6:50 a.m. PDT) With the push of a button, Mark Zuckerberg rang Nasdaq’s ceremonial opening bell to signal Facebook’s first day of trading, but if you missed the live video, you didn’t miss much. It was about as exciting as watching grass grow.

Facebook wouldn’t allow any outside media to the private event. And Nasdaq’s four-minute video feed didn’t show any speeches Zuckerberg or any executives may have given, just some sweeping multi-camera shots of the big crowd of happy, cheering employees.

Of course, they had reason to be happy – several millions of reasons.

Nasdaq will stream live video of the birth of its hottest new stock, Facebook, starting Friday morning with the ceremonial bell ringing ceremonies from the social network’s headquarters in Menlo Park.

Nasdaq changed the Timeline cover photo of its own Facebook page to welcome Facebook, which priced its highly anticipated IPO at $38 per share.

And Nasdaq posted an invitation to “Watch the Facebook IPO live from the NASDAQ page.” For your convenience, we’ve also embedded the video player below.

VentureBeat reported the ceremonies would start about 6:15 a.m. Pacific time, 15 minutes before the opening bell. You might see CEO Mark Zuckerberg and other employees looking a little bleary eyed after holding an all-night hackathon.

Facebook shares won’t begin trading until about 90 minutes after the bell, which is normal for an IPO of this size.